The Not-So-Secret Language Of The Misfit Shine

Here’s a random tidbit about the Misfit Shine, the activity tracker from Misfit Wearables.

I ran into CEO Sonny Vu about a week ago, and when he pulled a Misfit Shine out of his bag, he pointed out something that no one seems to have noticed. Or if they noticed it, they didn’t say anything about it online.

It’s been there since the Shine launched last year, on the back of the packaging, right below the Arabic. What’s that weird language there? Apparently, anyone who saw the “KL” label assumed that it stood for Kuala Lumpur (which is not a country or a language, but, okay).

Nope. It’s Klingon. Vu explained via email, “The alternative was Elvish but we didn’t know any reasonably solid speakers.”

It’s a funny idea, if you have the right (nerdy) sense of humor. And hey, translating “I am Shine, your physical activity monitor. You can wear me anywhere. Tap me for your progress and the time.” into Klingon probably required less effort than, say, creating the Klingon Hamlet.

There was a tradeoff, however. In order to make the room for the Klingon text, the company had to get rid of Russian. “Which, in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have done,” Vu admitted — it made things a little awkward a few weeks later when Misfit was approached by the company that eventually became its Russian partner. Vu pointed out that even though the language was removed from the packaging, the app and the website have been translated into Russian.

“We’re now sold in 32 countries, not including Qo’noS,” he said.

[photo by Susan Hobbs]

A Look at the Misfit Shine

Mimic Your Boss's Body Language to Build Rapport and Get Ahead

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To build a relationship with your superiors at work and have a better chance of moving up the ladder, try mirroring their mannerisms, says LearnVest. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

According to a study out of Duke University, subtle forms of mimicry can prove useful when you're trying to win someone over. It's known as the "chameleon effect" because, in the same way that a chameleon changes the color of its skin to match the environment, people can change behaviors and mannerisms to mirror the person who they're interacting with. Plus, another study from Nijmegen University in the Netherlands reveals that mimicry increases rapport — and your chances of getting what you want.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the LearnVest team is quick to add that this mimicry needs to be subtle and you need to choose your timing well. Trying to mirror your boss when he's mad at you will backfire, so make sure it's the right person at the right time.

How To Finally Get Ahead At Work | LearnVest via The Daily Muse

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Pocket update brings immersive mode and more language support

Kris Carlon 2014-04-09T10:00:01Z6 hours ago

Kris Carlon

Putting down roots in Berlin after six years of traveling is a major step for Kris Carlon, who has spent more time living out of a tent lately than sitting at a desk. Kris comes to the AndroidPIT Editorial Team via a lengthy period spent writing on art and culture in Australia and other places he has lived. He joined the Android community while resurfacing in civilization back in 2010 and has never looked back, using technology to replace his actual presence in other people's lives ever since.

Pocket, the offline reading app for Android has just been updated which takes advantage of KitKat's immersive mode, which pushes system bars off screen and floats your navigation buttons above whatever it is you're doing. The update also brings additional language support and some other reading optimization goodies.

The best just got better: Pocket is now optimized for immersive mode on KitKat. / © Pocket

The update to version 5.4 should appear automatically on your device in the very near future, and you'll get a splash screen announcing the update along with a changelog if you want more information. For the lazy, you'll get immersive mode on KitKat devices (and hidden status bars on Android 4.1+), providing you with a much nicer reading experience, and a ''refined layout and typography'' and ''automatic adjustments to layout and formatting when adjusting text size to deliver the most readable view''.

Pocket is an indispensable app for anyone that likes to read on their Android. / © AndroidPIT/Read It Later

Pocket now also supports Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Polish and Portuguese languages. If you're the kind of on-the-go person that always intends on coming back to an article later on and then completely forgets about it, Pocket is the perfect reminder. Simply share anything you come across to Pocket and have it ready for offline reading at your leisure.

You'll get the familiar reading view (left) when you open a Pocket article, but as soon as you scroll you'll enter immersive mode (right). / © AndroidPIT/Read It Later

Check out my list of three apps to improve your web browsing experience on Android as well as other awesome offline apps for Android.

Are you using Pocket? What other offline apps do you recommend?

Source: Google Play

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Hack – The Language Behind Facebook

Hack is the new language behind Facebook, which is still the most popular social network to date. It’s a web programming language invented and (recently) open-sourced by Facebook. The company claims that the language helps programmers to code programs faster and avoid errors early and easily.

(Image credit: guardianlv.com)

Hack is a language used to build complex websites at great speeds while still ensuring that the site’s source code is well organized and comparatively free of errors. Its "safety net" features allow programmers to write safer code which reduces the chances of later stepping into troubles.

In this post, we’ll look into Hack and some of its features which are arguably better than PHP, currently the most popular web programming language driving most websites. Hack is built to run on the Facebook’s HHVM virtual machine, which is known to deliver superior performance.

Recommended Reading: 10 Misconceptions That Are Not True About Learning Programming

The Dynamics Of A Problem

Back in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook, he used a web development language called "PHP". It was the most popular and (relatively) easy programming language at the time to create dynamic websites, with great speed.

PHP is a dynamically-typed language, which means you need not spend time in defining variables and once you finish your code, you can almost run it instantly. This eases the coding and decreases the development time and effort, but heavily increases the chances of getting into errors, which only shows its ugly head at the time of execution.

Read Also: 30 Common Reactions Programmers Have When Things Go Wrong

Can’t Afford To Have Mistakes

This further intensifies the problem as you need to run the code in order to find errors (unlike statically-typed languages). Thee errors continue to grow with the growth of the codebase. Small projects may not face a big issue, but with a large codebase with 5 errors per thousand-line code potentially carrying up to 5000 errors – that’s a lot to debug.

The situation worsens with Cloud-scale companies like Facebook when thousands of programmers write and ship new code every day. They also can’t afford to have errors in their code, which may lead to user data being compromised. So what is there to do?

Read Also: 10 Programming Habits Developers Should Adopt

Reinventing The Wheel

Since Facebook’s front-end was mostly written in PHP, switching to a new language would mean having to migrate the whole site code, which is not just impractical but also not feasible. Plus, if the programmers are already used to PHP, this calls for a massive reboot in human resource.

Luckily there is a better solution – they re-invented a language, derived from PHP, which can co-exist with this traditional language.

"Thus, Hack was born. We believe that it offers the best of both dynamically typed and statically typed languages, and that it will be valuable to projects of all sizes," it was announced on Facebook’s Engineering blog.

Hack Is Simply Better PHP

Essentially, Hack is "better PHP". Derived from PHP, it inter-operates seamlessly with PHP for faster and safer web development. You can have a project containing PHP and Hack code side-by-side and still, the project runs as required. This is the key feature that is going to attract PHP developers to try Hack. And possibly encourage them to gradually migrate their PHP code to Hack.

Hack primarily adds to PHP the power of static typing along with many more features found in other modern programming languages. It’s a language developed for HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), an open-source runtime platform built by Facebook to execute programs written in Hack and PHP.

The Hack and HHVM combo is targeting one of the foundations of modern web: rapid app development. It’s never been easy to test and debug web applications, but Hack is changing that by allowing programmers to detect errors early on without compromising the development cycle of PHP. The conclusion from several tech sites has been that Hack is good news.

Advantages Of Hack

The greatest enhancement that Hack provides over PHP is the removal of unnecessary and error-prone features. Hack adds safety nets (without slowing you down) so you make less errors. It also adds various features found in modern programming languages which makes writing code in Hack enjoyable.

Hack is both a dynamically typed and statically typed web development language, thus bringing the best of both typed languages. This is actually called "gradual typing," a type system which allows variables to be typed either at compile-time or at run-time. It can run your code without compiling – you can edit a file and reload the webpage and see the changes instantly.

Other Features

Hack brings in features such as collections, lambda expressions, and run-time enforcement of return types and parameter types, addition of generics, asynchronous programming, etc.

These new features are non-obstructive, thus the code written using Hack will still look and feel like the traditional dynamic code created using PHP. Moreover, engineers will better understand the code as static typing acts a lot like documentation.

What’s Not So Advantageous

The greatest disadvantage of Hack is that it has abandoned the features that make PHP a simpler language for beginners. You cannot embed the HTML directly in your source code, and you can’t have a code written outside of a function or class. But this is a relatively small problem. While it may deter beginners, PHP programmers would not find it hard to adapt to Hack and will probably deem the advantages of Hack convincing enough for adoption.

Read Also: Top 10 Websites To Learn Coding (Interactively) Online

Facebook has already deployed Hack on its website, which serves more than 1.2 billion people in the world. "We have deployed Hack at Facebook and it has been a great success. Over the last year, we have migrated nearly our entire PHP codebase to Hack," stated the article on the Facebook Engineering blog.

The Future

It’s going to be interesting to see how the PHP community at large will adopt this new language. We hope to see Hack supported on other PHP virtual machines and parsers, which will simplify code migration.

An open source project also means it’s not dependent on its original creators for new features and bug corrections. We may encounter some awesome feature in the future suggested or added by the open source developers community to this new language.

Moreover, Facebook is also working to improve Hack. They did create the language after all. "This is just the first step, and we are dedicated to continuing to evolve this software to make development even easier for both our own engineers and the broader community," as posted on the Facebook Engineering blog.

What do you think about Hack? Do you think Hack is better than PHP? Can it replace PHP? Please post your answers through comments.

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Using Kit Language in Windows and Linux

In the previous post, we have discussed about Kit, a very simple HTML templating language. If you had been following this, you should find that the GUI application which is capable of compiling Kit into browser-compliant HTML format is Codekit.

Unfortunately, Codekit, is only available for OS X, there is currently no similar application for Windows and Linux that support Kit.

If you are working in Windows and Linux machine, yet would like to use Kit, you can use Grunt as an alternative. Grunt has a massive collection of plugins, contributed by generous developers around the world — this includes the plugin to compile Kit language, grunt-codekit. Let’s check it out.

Recommended Reading: 5 Latest Web Development Tools You Should Know

Note: Even though the following tip is primarily aimed to show Windows and Linux users an alternative to Codekit, OS X user can also use it.

Getting Started

First, we will create a directory for our project. Let’s launch Terminal or Command Prompt, and type the following command lines:

mkdir kit-gruntcd kit-grunt

We have created a new directory named kit-grunt; the second line lets us enter it. But if you have previously created a project directory, you may skip the first line, and immediately navigate to your own directory in Terminal with the cd command.

Within the project directory, we create a new folder named kit where we will put the .kit files. Type this command below:

mkdir kit

We then also install both Grunt and the plugin, with these commands. Note that you have to install Node.js in your system first.

npm install grunt --save-devnpm install grunt-codekit --save-dev

Once the process is completed you will find a new folder, node_modules, containing the modules that we have installed.

Configuration

Create a new file named Gruntfile.js in the project directory, and put the following code in. This code is a Grunt Wrapper where we will register, configure and execute Grunt task. If you are using Sublime Text, you can easily insert this code using the Grunt Snippets.

module.exports = function(grunt) { grunt.initConfig({  }); }

Then we define the codekit task within the grunt.initConfig, like so.

module.exports = function(grunt) { grunt.initConfig({ codekit: { your_target: { files : { 'index.html' : 'kit/index.kit', } }, }, }); }

This configuration will compile index.kit into index.html. To try this out, we can add this in index.kit.

<!-- @var = This is the variable --><p><!-- @var --></p>

…and run grunt codekit in Terminal.

The index.html is successfully generated and as you can see below, the variable’s value is also successfully applied within the paragraph tag.

File Inclusion

As we have mentioned in our previous post, we can include/import files into a Kit file. Given that we have header.kit, sidebar.kit, and footer.kit (I assume that we have added corresponding content within these files), we can include them into index.kit, like so.

<!-- @include inc/header.kit --><div class="container"> <div class="header row"> <h1>This is the header</h1> </div> <div class="row"> <div class="col-md-8"> <p>This is the content</p> </div> <!-- @include inc/sidebar.kit -->  </div></div><!-- @include inc/footer.kit -->

Let’s run the grunt codekit command again in Terminal. And here we go! The content from those files are put together into index.html. Nice!

Conclusion

Grunt is a great alternative to many web development tools, including compiling Kit file. I hope this tip is useful, particularly for Windows and Linux users who want to get their hands on Kit language.

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Language Learning Giant Busuu Signs Pearson Deal To Disrupt TEFL Market

busuu — the world’s largest social network for language learning at 40 million users — has signed a distribution partnership with Pearson English, a newly formed business unit of the world’s largest education company. The deal will be exclusive for the next 4 months, after which Pearson will be free to sign similar deals with other partners, should it choose to do so. However, it gives Busuu and edge over its competitors, give that the bulk of foreign language learning is to learn English. The partnership is described as strategic and Pearson is not taking any equity in Busuu.

The course launched this Summer will be free to busuu’s paying subscribers and at a nominal charge to its free members.

The deal gives busuu’s user base access to an affordable online test, gSET by Pearson English, which — in Plain English — is a globally recognised standard for learning English as a foreign language. In other words, if you are a TOEFL teacher right now, I’d consider looking into a new career, because this is a seriously disruptive move.

The market opportunity in digital language learning is huge and growing at a clip. Some estimates put the total market value at $60 billion — but $50 billion of that is in English. And only 5-10% of that market is taking place online. So you can see why Pearson – traditionally associated with textbooks and mostly offline learning – is so keen to strike online deals. Furthermore, much of bussu’s user-base is in emerging markets – and they all want to learn English, for the most part.

Pearson English’s Global Scale of English test lets language learners measure their current level of English on an on-going basis using a globally consistent numeric scale. Obviously busuu will also be able to see that data and apply it to its own operations.

The gSET by Pearson English is measured on Pearson English’s Global Scale of English, designed to be a global numeric standard for the measurement of English language proficiency. Pearson English is right now consolidating its existing businesses, including Wall Street English, GlobalEnglish and ELT, under one umbrella. It also has existing deals with New York-based Voxy, which has raised $14.8 million to date, and Grupo Multi, in Brazil.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, president of Pearson English, Bhav Singh, told us that the shortage of native English language teachers in the world means there is a lot of opportunity online.

“I think the present, not the future of education is digital. Eventually we hope to hope to look at cross-selling Pearson products. But the feedback loop right now is most important. The world is moving to the personalisation of an audience of one,” he said.

CEO and Co-founder of busuu, Bernhard Niesner told us that with this Pearson test, for the first time, Busuu will be able to “measure and work out how to improve the course. We are working on adaptive learning, based on customisation. The vision is to cut down on the acquisition time to learn a language.”

Plus, of course, people in emerging markets don’t have to travel to go to a TOEFL test centre, when they could do the test on busuu.

Lingua.ly for Android Teaches You New Foreign Language Vocabulary

Android: Previously, we've featured Chrome extension Lingua.ly that allows you to learn new words in a foreign language. The service's new Android app not only provides a similar service, but allows you to build your own personal vocabulary collection.

The app works very similarly to its desktop counterpart. You'll start by being quizzed on your current language abilities and the app will give you articles to learn new words based on your reading level. It also contains flash cards, quizzes, and a personal dictionary list so you can add words that you've either learned or want to learn.

Lingua.ly | Google Play Store

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Google Alerts now allows you to specify your language and geographic region for more precise, releva

Google Alerts now allows you to specify your language and geographic region for more precise, relevant results to your alerts. If you're new to Google Alerts, here are some useful things you can do with it.

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